Remove curl from suggests

DESCRIPTION

@@ -3,7 +3,7 @@ Version: 1.14.9
 Title: Extension of `data.frame`
 Depends: R (>= 3.1.0)
 Imports: methods
-Suggests: bit64 (>= 4.0.0), bit (>= 4.0.4), curl, R.utils, xts, zoo (>= 1.8-1), yaml, knitr, markdown
+Suggests: bit64 (>= 4.0.0), bit (>= 4.0.4), R.utils, xts, zoo (>= 1.8-1), yaml, knitr, markdown
 Description: Fast aggregation of large data (e.g. 100GB in RAM), fast ordered joins, fast add/modify/delete of columns by group using no copies at all, list columns, friendly and fast character-separated-value read/write. Offers a natural and flexible syntax, for faster development.
 License: MPL-2.0 | file LICENSE
 URL: https://r-datatable.com, https://Rdatatable.gitlab.io/data.table, https://github.com/Rdatatable/data.table

NEWS.md

@@ -561,6 +561,8 @@
     identical(DT1, DT2)                  # TRUE
     ```
 
+55. `fread(URL)` with `https:` and `ftps:` could timeout if proxy settings were not guessed right by `curl::curl_download`, [#1686](https://github.com/Rdatatable/data.table/issues/1686). `fread(URL)` now uses `download.file()` as default for downloading files from urls. Thanks to @cderv for the report and Benjamin Schwendinger for the fix.
+
 ## NOTES
 
 1. New feature 29 in v1.12.4 (Oct 2019) introduced zero-copy coercion. Our thinking is that requiring you to get the type right in the case of `0` (type double) vs `0L` (type integer) is too inconvenient for you the user. So such coercions happen in `data.table` automatically without warning. Thanks to zero-copy coercion there is no speed penalty, even when calling `set()` many times in a loop, so there's no speed penalty to warn you about either. However, we believe that assigning a character value such as `"2"` into an integer column is more likely to be a user mistake that you would like to be warned about. The type difference (character vs integer) may be the only clue that you have selected the wrong column, or typed the wrong variable to be assigned to that column. For this reason we view character to numeric-like coercion differently and will warn about it. If it is correct, then the warning is intended to nudge you to wrap the RHS with `as.<type>()` so that it is clear to readers of your code that a coercion from character to that type is intended. For example :

R/fread.R

@@ -76,17 +76,13 @@ yaml=FALSE, autostart=NA, tmpdir=tempdir(), tz="UTC")
     if (w <- startsWithAny(file, c("https://", "ftps://", "http://", "ftp://", "file://"))) {  # avoid grepl() for #2531
       # nocov start
       tmpFile = tempfile(fileext = paste0(".",tools::file_ext(file)), tmpdir=tmpdir)  # retain .gz extension in temp filename so it knows to be decompressed further below
-      if (w<=2L) { # https: or ftps:
-        if (!requireNamespace("curl", quietly = TRUE))
-          stopf("URL requires https:// connection for which fread() requires 'curl' package which cannot be found. Please install 'curl' using 'install.packages('curl')'.") # nocov
-
-        curl::curl_download(file, tmpFile, mode="wb", quiet = !showProgress)
-      } else {
-        method = if (w==5L) "internal"  # force 'auto' when file: to ensure we don't use an invalid option (e.g. wget), #1668
-                 else getOption("download.file.method", default="auto")  # http: or ftp:
-        download.file(file, tmpFile, method=method, mode="wb", quiet=!showProgress)
-        # In text mode on Windows-only, R doubles up \r to make \r\r\n line endings. mode="wb" avoids that. See ?connections:"CRLF"
+      if (w<=2L && base::getRversion()<"3.2.2") { # https: or ftps: can be read by default by download.file() since 3.2.2
+        stopf("URL requires download.file functionalities from R >=3.2.2. You can still manually download the file and fread the downloaded file.")
       }
+      method = if (w==5L) "internal"  # force 'auto' when file: to ensure we don't use an invalid option (e.g. wget), #1668
+               else getOption("download.file.method", default="auto")  # http: or ftp:
+      # In text mode on Windows-only, R doubles up \r to make \r\r\n line endings. mode="wb" avoids that. See ?connections:"CRLF"
+      download.file(file, tmpFile, method=method, mode="wb", quiet=!showProgress)
       file = tmpFile
       on.exit(unlink(tmpFile), add=TRUE)
       # nocov end

man/fread.Rd

@@ -115,7 +115,7 @@ Currently, the \code{yaml} setting is somewhat inflexible with respect to incorp
 
 \bold{File Download:}
 
-When \code{input} begins with http://, https://, ftp://, ftps://, or file://, \code{fread} detects this and \emph{downloads} the target to a temporary file (at \code{tempfile()}) before proceeding to read the file as usual. Secure URLS (ftps:// and https://) are downloaded with \code{curl::curl_download}; ftp:// and http:// paths are downloaded with \code{download.file} and \code{method} set to \code{getOption("download.file.method")}, defaulting to \code{"auto"}; and file:// is downloaded with \code{download.file} with \code{method="internal"}. NB: this implies that for file://, even files found on the current machine will be "downloaded" (i.e., hard-copied) to a temporary file. See \code{\link{download.file}} for more details.
+When \code{input} begins with http://, https://, ftp://, ftps://, or file://, \code{fread} detects this and \emph{downloads} the target to a temporary file (at \code{tempfile()}) before proceeding to read the file as usual. URLS (ftps:// and https:// as well as ftp:// and http://) paths are downloaded with \code{download.file} and \code{method} set to \code{getOption("download.file.method")}, defaulting to \code{"auto"}; and file:// is downloaded with \code{download.file} with \code{method="internal"}. NB: this implies that for file://, even files found on the current machine will be "downloaded" (i.e., hard-copied) to a temporary file. See \code{\link{download.file}} for more details.
 
 \bold{Shell commands:}